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Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Short Takes

The Wall Street Journal selects James Marten's AMERICA'S CORPORAL as an "outstanding stud[y] of life after battle" in its roundup of this year's gift books on the Civil War. "Mr. Marten focuses on James Tanner, a double amputee who vaulted into prominence when he was drafted on the spot to take the testimony of witnesses to Lincoln's assassination and who eventually became a spokesman for disabled veterans."

OA: The cover illustration is "Riot of the Madmen", by George Grosz. It
depicts urban mayhem, shipwrecks, arson, looting, and various types of
interpersonal violence, but it is drawn in very simple lines, not much
more than stick figures. How did this come to be the cover of your book?
How does it relate to the poems?
JS: I first saw this drawing at LACMA with my wife and good friend, the
poet Joshua Robbins. There are a lot of things I love about it. I’ve
spent a lot of hours looking at album covers and book covers over the
years, and I really appreciate one you can continue looking at, continue
noticing little details of. So that’s part of it, but what made it
seem right to me for the book was exactly what you’re pointing to: we
see all of these terrible things happening in the drawing, but because
the drawing is so simple, so cartoonish, it gives the impression that
none of it is really necessary at all, that none of it need be real.
It’s that contrast, between the very real sorts of violence the drawing
points to in the world and the form that says that everything that led
to it was quite careless and could be easily wiped away if only we would
put a little work and thought toward it that I really love. And I hope
it resonates, then, first with the title of the book and then with the
individual poems. I’ve tried, so much as I was able, to walk these
poems up to those moments when we might start becoming able to ask the
questions we would need to ask in order to begin to find some ways to
start setting the world right, and the Grosz I hope sets the stage or
mood or whatever for those attempts of mine.

I’ve got to say thank you here too to the wonderful folks at the
University of Georgia Press for finding a way to get the rights to the
Grosz and for then designing such a wonderful cover. I couldn’t be
happier with it.

Congratulations to Sarah Gorham! Her book, STUDY IN PERFECT, was chosen as one of Slate's 27 Overlooked Books of 2014. "Easily one of the best books I read this year was Sarah Gorham’s gorgeous, one-of-a-kind Study in Perfect. . . . Gorham’s writing is crystal-clear and drawn from a
more poetic well than most."